to rhink the reason why so many NHS appointments are not attended is......

[HookedOnHooking]

People simply cannot get through to cancel or change them.

I have rung over and over and over again and cannot get through. Currently been on hold for 20 minutes.......

I 'missed' a mw appt despite being in the waiting room 15 mins early.
I booked it that day, somehow i was left off a handwritten list (written 3 hrs after i booked apt)
I signed in for apt fine. But by 15min late i knew something was wrong, i checked with reception, they didnt know anything.
In the end i caught her going between rooms.
By then 50min late and dont know what would have happened if it wasnt last apt of day.
So what about an email/text
Youve been allocated a date/time for your referral. Please sign in to get details.

I think it has a lot to do with education levels/accuracy from school. Where ive worked it feels like 50% of manual things will have an error.
It feels that this is the case with the nhs too.

Admin doesnt pay well but can be as vital to the service as the
Consultant. I mean if they send you an its all fine letter when its not...

I made this point myself earlier this week, when I eventually got through only because I found a letter with a direct dial number on it. Nobody could work out which phone has been ringing for hours....

I use the patient app on my iPhone to book and cancel appointments. I can also request repeat prescriptions to be sent to my local pharmacy.
The service is very efficient.

One of the problems is that patients change emails or mobile numbers and don't think to change it on their details whereas they do think to notify doctors, etc if they move house which is why snail mail is still the chosen option. I can't tell you how much time I waste trying to ring people on not recognised numbers or phones that are switched off. Even if there is an answering service we can't leave a message because of the risk of breaching confidentiality if someone else hears it

Maybe the GP or hospital could check that they have the patient's correct details when they attend appointments? I've never had my details checked - I give my name, I'm told to take a seat - wouldn't take more than a few seconds to be asked for my mobile no (or even the first few digits to double check)

Naty - I agree. People need to check more carefully. I was discharged from hospital with DS2 (in Australia, so not the NHS but just shows it's not just the NHS this happens in) with a discharge sheet saying that my baby had died. He hadn't - he was very much alive and with me - but she'd clicked on the wrong sodding line on the computer screen.
So because of her error, DS2 wasn't entered into the usual baby checklist.

I noticed when I got home, and because I had home visits due to using blood thinners, I asked the visiting MW to please get me a proper one as it was quite disconcerting having an inaccurate "baby deceased" form in my home. She did get me a new one but it still didn't get him onto the list; as I discovered when I tried to get an appt with the follow up services because they hadn't contacted me.

Maybe the GP or hospital could check that they have the patient's correct details when they attend appointments?

To be fair, the new QEII in Brum - where they need volunteers to help people with the automated check-in (rather defeating the point) - has a system which asks every time you check-in if the details are correct, with a chance to update them.

However, it makes not one jot of difference how right the details are, if someone is going to use up some out-of-date stickers from a patients notes (see above).

I completely agree - if someone uses an out of date sticker then no amount of checking phone details is going to help. It can't do any harm generally though.

I completely agree - if someone uses an out of date sticker then no amount of checking phone details is going to help. It can't do any harm generally though.

(I'll confess, I was that patient ).

It was worse than that. Because I insisted they must have the wrong address, things got quite heated. They'd check, swear blind they had the right address, and the next letter would still be sent to the old address (by now we'd made friends with the people living at our old house).

This could have gone on for years if I hadn't intercepted those stickers. As it was, I was finally seen over a year after the initial request. Which - bless my optician - turned out to be a good call. I do have glaucoma. Which went undiagnosed for over a year. The most chilling thing was when I did get seen, and explained the farce to the consultant, he commented that I was unusual. Most people with a silent condition like glaucoma would have just forgotten the referral, and thought nothing more of it.

As it is, I'll forever wonder quite how much of my sight I lost in that time. We'll never know.

Kafka was actually a serious reporter. He wrote exposés .

I completely understand your frustration - when things go wrong in with processes like this in the NHS they can have devastating effects.

I had a letter on Saturday saying an appointment for DS2 in 2017 had been cancelled and I had 7 days to make a new one or he would be removed from the clinic.
I phoned 87 times between Saturday and Monday no one answered, it didn't go on hold just cut off. Tuesday I went to Children's Outpatients and said I wanted to make a new appointment and was told "they don't make appointments that far ahead, ignore it"

Notso then surely its a typo was it for like oct? So maybe 2015?
I think it would be good if we did have a copy of all results and notes about us.
For eg
Dd has been seeing eye hospital for yrs, was about to be discharged and yet suddenly at last apt been given glasses. This was such a turnaround i would have liked to see previous results to see if she was fine 8mths earlier.

Not a typo Naty1 He is due to be seen in 2017 by this consultant. They want a certain ammount of time between tests. I just hope they do send a new appointment nearer the time.

I am trying to change an appointment at the moment (clashes with another appointment) and after ringing for ages keep getting "sorry the other person has hung up"

I think it would be good if we did have a copy of all results and notes about us.

Why don't you then ? It's your right. Just ask.

For MrsLH we have copies of all of the letters between various consultants and HCPs and our GP going back 20 years. For most we are copied in automatically, and for those that get "forgotten" we get our GP to print off a copy every few months.

Absolutely invaluable. They detail MrsLHs condition in (painful) detail, (and manage to answer ever single descriptor on the ESA50 many times over). They also serve as a reminder to timelines and the order of some treatments.

my mum would have dropped dead if she'd been told the results of her tests.... heart failure.

she thought it meant she was dying - right now, dead within a month sort of thing, instead of something you can live with for years.

I frequently get letters arriving just a day or two before the appointment. I've missed at least two appointments because this happened when I was on a week's holiday and so the first I knew about it was when I got back. The NHS is incredibly inefficient.

The NHS is incredibly inefficient.

Actually the medical bits are amazing. World class. It's the administration which is shite. If anything needs privatisation, it's the admin ...

I finally got through to to change the appointment but of course they can't just look and give and new date on the phone they have to post one out. Now I just have to hope it doesn't clash with one of the other appointments he has

Some years ago now but I had an appointment for DD which was changed by letter, then a phone call from a completely different consultant asking why I hadn't presented DD for her appointment. The one I had not been told about.

Also had a DNA note put on my record at a GPs where they had just introduced a policy of deregistring any patient who failed to turn up or cancel 3 times. This was in relation to a date when I had no appointment to attend, cancel or miss.

LH - that won't necessarily work either. As I said, the hospital at which I used to work started outsourcing a lot of their admin to a company abroad - made it all a LOT worse.

What really needs to happen, and probably won't for many reasons, not least of which is cost, is that a computer system needs to be set up for the whole of the NHS, that is the same across each health trust in every area. A centralised system that gives everyone a unique number when they're born, that they carry through with them, wherever they live. One that allows access to previous records from previous treatment centres, so that things don't need to be duplicated, and time and resources don't need to be wasted. One that means staff in different hospitals don't need training in the computer system when they change jobs.

And patient access systems for booking their own appointments - excellent plan! They could be fed into the centralised system too. And even, wait for it, be cross referenced between different departments so that they could see the logical progression of appointments!

If they could do that, then things would improve. But they can't (won't? I don't know).

Thumb they tried - it cost the taxpayer billions and the full thing was scrapped. Part of it is still there though and does at least mean that some data is easily accessed from both GP and hospitals.

There were huge problems with the way it was scoped and managed. Also there was a sizable minority of tin-foil-hatters in the public that didn't want their info shared and wanted to opt out (same as we saw with the ID card). Some of it could have been fixed by reining in who could access the data but like most government IT projects it was doomed from the start.

As for a unique number, we are all allocated one at birth (or on nationalisation) and its called your NHS Number. I don't have a scooby what mine is as I've never known it unlike my NI number which I know off by heart!

My dad has had many eye ops and is often back and forth to the hospital. During that time he's been told off for missing some appts. All were organised at a time he told them he would be away. They ignored that, the letter arrived when he was away, he obviously didn't see it till he got home which was after the appt date. It's happened about 4 times. Mistakes happen I understand that but they always treat him as if it's his fault. Very unfair.

God preserve us from [UK] government IT projects !!!

I can't think of one which has actually delivered what was needed and solved the problems the specification called for, which is my rather naive definition of "success".

The fact that projects like Universal Credit are being called a success tells you all you need to know about government IT, and the likelihood of future projects achieving anything meaningful.

Works. On budget. On time. Pick any two...

I received a letter about my daughter's birthmark saying she had a hospital appt two days earlier which I never knew about. The referral system had broken down. Another wasted appt and a couple of months delay for my daughter.